Well, the story is, if you back up your hard drive, then you reinstall Windows, move the files you want back, they won’t be accessible, even to Administrator, if they were private, like the contents of C:\Documents and Settings\Yourname.

You have to boot into safe mode, log in as Administrator, go to the Folder Properties you want, and remove the security restrictions.

I had to do a fair bit of digging to find that out.. but it’s not hard to get your files back. I’m sure there’s a Microsoft KB article somewhere about it; if anyone finds one, feel free to post it in the comments.

The FTP transfer dialog died when I clicked “Cancel” (as usual), and when I tried to shutdown, it gave me this error. The FTP transfer window won’t cancel, and sits like that until you shutdown the computer… the old-fashioned way.

Sometimes it just doesn’t pay to get out of bed in the morning.
Sometimes it just doesn’t pay to use IE as an FTP client.
Sometimes it just doesn’t pay to argue with Windows.
But it always pays to hold down the power button for >4 seconds.

Well, this was funny for me solely because my laptop’s battery lasts less than 60 minutes. So, 60 minutes / 100% = 0.6 minutes (or 36 seconds) for 1%. At 0%, I really don’t know how much time is left. Yet I was able to take the pic, and save it in paint before the laptop died.